


reminders of you

by kaumari



Series: time is the change from stardust to bones [8]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Death, Immortality, Nonbinary Character, Other, yeah it's so important i need to add a separate tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26497507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaumari/pseuds/kaumari
Summary: in which tsutomu visits a grave and doesn't cry from the weight of their memories.
Relationships: Goshiki Tsutomu/Shirabu Kenjirou
Series: time is the change from stardust to bones [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1889728
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	reminders of you

**Author's Note:**

> i'm too tired to link anything uhh follow me on twt @kaumaridevi

Tsutomu isn’t a stranger to the cruelty of time. Decades upon centuries upon millennia have taught them that a life is a fragile, crystalline thing. It only takes a crack to shatter into glittering pieces of beautiful tragedy. They know this better than most of their siblings, and even this knowledge isn’t enough to ease the addictive pull of the flitting humans around them.

They’ve seen more humans than years they’ve lived, and yet Tsutomu is still continuously surprised by the aching holes some leave in their heart. It’s an aching cavern, a doused lamp, an absence they never get used to. Seeing the graves is the most sombering part.

Tsutomu always goes to their graves. It seems uncaring to forget about them altogether, as if the years they’d spent in each other’s lives meant nothing. As if the space Tsutomu occupied in their hearts meant nothing. And despite the countless times they've done this before, somehow Shirabu Kenjirō’s death feels different.

He’d died naturally, Tsutomu knows. It had been a long life, a good one even. They had spent fifty long years in each other’s company, until Kenjirō told them to stop holding themselves back. Their reaction hadn’t been Tsutomu’s finest moment, not by any stretch. Kenjirō had always had a temper, loyal to his own points and too stubbornly prideful to change them. He had usually been right anyway, so it hardly mattered. Thousands of years, and Tsutomu is hardly the wiser for it.

The last thirty-some years were spent wandering aimlessly around the other side of the Earth. How America had changed in the time they’d been gone. Towering cities crowded their mind and body, pushed out the thoughts of a man on the other side of the world with a failing mind and body. It didn’t help to think about them in their final years, the stretch toward an inevitable end. It never made it any easier.

Shirabu Kenjirō, immortalized in name only, in a forgotten plot of land on the outskirts of a forgotten town. No one will know him, save for the mourners who pass by. Another dead, just as life demands.

Does that mean they’re not alive? Immortal until the end of time, without the promise of death, is almost more lonely. They’ll never have anything to look forward to. They’ll spend their whole existence staring at the past.

A grave means nothing to them, truly, despite their insistence to visit every one of them. It’s only there to serve as a reminder. Break your heart over and over, but you’ll never find fulfillment. It’ll always elude you, wisps of mortality slipping through your fingers.

Shirabu Kenjirō. His favorite flower was a hydrangea. The ones in purple, his favorite color. Tsutomu lays them in front of the grave and stares at its ridges of curves until the sun leaves them too. And they start to count down the days, waiting to see how long it’ll take before purple hydrangeas don’t make them cry. 


End file.
